Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of computer systems, and, more particularly, to using generic location codes for cloning physical and virtual systems.
In today's world, virtualization is an important aspect of many large scale computing environments, including data center environments and cloud environments. Such environments typically benefit from elasticity, reliability and security. Cloning physical and virtual machines is commonly used to address scalability and customer demand in a data center or other computing environments with large numbers of similarly configured computer systems.
Cloning addresses the problem of solving the similar types of configuration typically desired for systems across one or more data centers. But cloning input output (I/O) device configuration can be a big challenge in a data center environment and typically requires much manual intervention. For example, in such environments a System Administrator typically has to map all the physical hardware positions to the internal location codes which appear in management software, often using home-grown processes and naming conventions to facilitate this mapping.
A major problem with these manual processes is that the processes have to be disseminated and understood by everyone that configures such systems. Further, the mapping of configurations from one machine to another is still manual and prone to human error.